[OSM-talk] A glossary for terms

[Lars Aronsson]

Colin Mackay wrote:

> As I take my first steps with this project it occurs to me that 
> in my few years away from GIS I'd forgotton just how much a lack 
> of consensus there was between different groups on the 
> definition of terms. What this means is that with some 
> terminology I am confused about the exact meaning.

It's good to know that you've been writing GIS software, because 
most people here have not.  Just like GIS was once a radical 
change in the world of cartography, we are now seeing a radical 
change in the world of GIS, with non-GIS people pouring in into 
open source projects such as Open Street Map.  I'd say OSM is more 
of an open source (and wiki) project than a GIS project.

It would be easy to ridicule the ignorant newcomers (Python kids, 
who never learnt Fortran) and say that they should listen to the 
old experts and respect their old consensus agreements.  That's 
probably what happened to the GIS pioneers, who in the 1970s wrote 
books on how to make "lineprinter maps" (my local university 
library has several of those, great reading!).  But nonetheless, 
both sides are here and both shape the future. Those who want to 
be listened to, had better speak the language of their (younger) 
target audience.

Another GIS person, Kendall Sears, culture-clashed into this 
concrete wall of misunderstanding in December, as you can see from 
the list archives, and has been silent since then.  I hope he is 
still lurking and that he'll recover and return.

In August I heard a presentation of MapBender by Arnulf Christl at 
the Wikimania conference (for Wikipedia people) in Frankfurt, 
Germany, and I just shook my head in disbelief at the attitude 
among GIS people to embrace and play with proprietary GIS data, 
that was a silent assumption in his presentation.  There is now 
free software for GIS, but there aren't any useful free GIS data, 
at least not outside the U.S.A., so the free software evangelists 
within the GIS community seem to just have given up about free 
data.

Given this line-up, I think it's important to know where we are 
and where we come from.

I was born in 1966, saw my first computer in 1982, learned Fortran 
in 1983, and C/UNIX in 1986.  This is when I started to appreciate 
free software, by Richard Stallman's definition.  I've been using 
the Internet since 1988 and Linux since 1992.  In 1992 I started 
Project Runeberg (runeberg.org), a Scandinavian literature archive 
on the Internet. Inspired by, but frustrated with, Wikipedia, I 
started by own Swedish wiki (susning.nu) in 2001, which for some 
time was the world's 3rd largest wiki.  Since 1996 I'm an 
independent consultant, specializing in large systems and 
performance tuning. I wrote my first prototype for an 
Internet-based (telnet) mapping application in 1991.  A second 
WWW-based prototype from May 1994 is still online at 
http://www.lysator.liu.se/rwi/
(Who else has 12 year old web prototypes laying around?)

When I found out about OSM in May 2005, it was a great "finally!" 
moment, to see people starting out from "free" to make free maps.  
Today's OSM still looks rather primitive, but it's actually 
producing something.  If you remember Wikipedia in 2001 or the 
entire WWW in 1993, you understand that small things can grow big.

My user page on the OSM wiki is
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/User:LA2


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se